Sometimes, It’s OK to Cry at Work

The latest election-related viral video shows President Obama praising and thanking his team of volunteers. What’s the big deal? He cries (at about 3:20, if you haven’t seen it yet). When he wipes his face, making it clear that, yes, he’s really crying, his audience applauds.

Love it or hate it, people seem to agree that this video is remarkable. Some think Obama’s tears herald his authentic humility and humanity. Others suspect the crying episode was staged, or that “No Drama Obama” was simply exhausted, his emotional defenses worn down.

Whatever the reason, why such excitement over a few quiet tears? Crying is a part of work life—and politics—even when we wish it were otherwise.

Obama’s tears have dragged Ed Muskie back into the spotlight. In 1972, when Senator Muskie was a democratic presidential candidate, a New Hampshire newspaper “accused Mr. Muskie’s wife, Jane, of smoking, drinking and cursing in an ‘unladylike’ way.” Publicly defending her—outside, in a snowstorm—Muskie seemed to choke up. He later insisted that it was snow, not tears, running down his face, but his presidential bid was shot. “‘It changed people’s minds about me,’ he said about the episode. ‘They were looking for a strong, steady man, and here I was weak.’”

Standards have certainly changed since Muskie’s fall. “Smoking, drinking, and cursing”—not to mention unladylike behavior—don’t raise many eyebrows, and tears no longer necessarily equal weakness. Crying, in fact, has become an acceptable behavior for politicians, from Ronald Reagan to John Boehner, from George W. Bush to Bill Clinton. In the private sector, Apple luminary Steve Jobs was known to be a copious weeper. Ain’t no shame in it, the criers seem to think.

Whatever the reason, why such excitement over a few quiet tears?

For female leaders, however, tears are trickier. Hillary Clinton cried on the campaign trail in 2008, which garnered, predictably, jeers as well as cheers. Clinton, discussing “the double standards that a woman running for president faces,” said it best: “If you get too emotional, that undercuts you… A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But [for] a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.” Public tears are unpredictable, making men human and women weak—or vice versa, depending on who’s judging.

Luckily, for most of us, our lives are not played out on the public stage. What do tears mean for us ordinary mortals? Laborers, office workers, bosses, executives: what happens if we cry at work?

Traditional business wisdom insists that crying at work is verboten. “It is never okay to cry in your office, with your colleagues, or, god forbid, in front of your boss,” wrote Great On The Job author and HBR blogger Jodi Glickman, soon after Lesley Stahl’s “60 Minutes” interview with weepy new Speaker of the House John Boehner in late 2010. After Boehner’s tearful entrance on the American stage, Glickman wrote, “Even though the highest-ranking congressman in the land does it, you still can’t.”

While I don’t think we should all start toting onions in our laptop cases to trigger tears on demand, it may be time for a rethink. Crying in a work context is sometimes appropriate, acceptable, and even, as Obama demonstrates, admirable. Here’s why.

Tears—and any other authentic display of emotion—show that we’re deeply moved, which in turn moves our audience, as Obama’s cheering volunteers demonstrate. As George McGovern said of Muskie—his rival in the 1972 primary—his emotional response showed “his humanity and his essential decency.”

Last month, one of my colleagues left the university to take a job in public service. A warm, gregarious woman, she’d been in our community for twenty years, becoming an indelible part of the culture. She got choked up when she announced her plans to depart, and she proceeded to cry many times—publicly, unembarrassed—before she left. Perhaps I’m just a softie, but her crying didn’t seem unprofessional—in fact, it showed how much her work, and this community, meant to her.

Tears are an appropriate response to loss of all kinds—leaving a job, selling a beloved house, grieving death and tragedy. It would be inhuman not to cry after the horrors of 9/11, the devastation and trauma of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

I was an absolute wreck for weeks, months, after the unexpected death of my boss and mentor, Dr. Jocelyn Spragg, a champion for diversity in medical and science education. I’d come home from my office exhausted, lamenting to my husband, “I cried again at work today.”

“You’re not crying because you had a bad review, or you messed up, or you’re bad at your job,” he told me. “Someone died, someone close to you. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” He’s a CEO, so I tried to believe him. But it was embarrassing, to cry like this, publicly, uncontrolled, with big messy speech-disrupting sobs, an ugly snuffling red-faced affair—not neatly, like polished Obama, whose tears didn’t impede his words.

But grief is grief, untidy and slow; so I cried, at work and at home, and for a long time. I wish I’d had Annie Bourne’s sensitive and wise HBR blog post, on grieving for a colleague, to comfort me then. “We were just colleagues,” she writes of her boss and mentor killed on 9/11. “Yet we”—Bourne and her remaining coworkers—“felt grief that was profound, painful and incredibly private. We were flattened by the sudden, brutal loss of our colleague… But it is unprofessional to cry at work, much less shake with sobs by the cubes. You have to get on with it. You are there to work.”

Crying over the death of a colleague: unattractive, yes; inappropriate, no. Unprofessional? I’m not so sure. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t cry, simple as that. And, while crying at work is neither pleasant nor pretty, true feeling shows engagement, commitment, and heart. What more, really, could an employer hope for?